Bandai already represented at the time one of the largest producers of video games, toys, accessories and in general everything that revolves around the universe of Japanese imagery, including anime. In 1994 the console market it was in absolute excitement with all the most important manufacturers busy designing their own machines, rivaling the competition on the technical and software front.
In that year the first Playstation, SEGA’s Saturn and Nec’s PC-FX were released while Nintendo was still working on the future Nintendo 64. Bandai had sensed in advance that the market was progressively going in the “home” direction and shortly before had started designing a new console, called Playdia.
Anime brands were the ace in the hole
Bandai had a strong collaboration with some of the most famous anime and manga brands of the time, from Dragon Ball to Sailor Moon, passing through Ultraman and Hello Kitty, which actually released en masse in the first three months of the console’s life. Why isn’t Playdia a console that has remained imprinted in the collective imagination, then? Because his “cartridges” to shoot actually ended up there.
Looking at the aesthetics of the chassis you immediately understand the target audience. The font almost perfectly reproduced that of Playmobil toys (with whom it also shared half the name, by the way), and the very bright colors used for the keys and body immediately made us imagine an audience made up of children. The prediction that Bandai didn’t get right was precisely this, because the pre-adolescents of the time were completely ready to throw themselves into advanced and more graphically captivating hardware.
Bandai wasn’t the latest addition
Actually Bandai was not new to the hardware market, even if the previous experiments actually stopped at the concept (almost) of prototype. At the end of the 70s they created their “pong”, a console with four integrated games simply called TV Jack, with some variants up to the Bandai SuperVision 8000 which had a total of seven games available on cartridge (integrated support starting from the version 5000).
All this to make it clear that, after all, the Japanese company was not exactly the latest arrival in the hardware field and indeed, the ascending parable seemed like an unstoppable track. Analyzing the series of errors that led to the tragic and premature death of Playdia, the hardware factor must certainly also be considered. In 1994 in full polygonal fervor 32-bit… Bandai equipped its console with an 8-bit central processor. In fact, Playdia represents the only console with that technology belonging to the fifth generation.
Some missteps by Bandai
Let’s remember all the great masterpieces and games that the 8-bit era gave us. Let’s just think of the great NES or SEGA Master System titles: there was a way to exploit that (little) hardware power anyway. Fort of integrated CD player (and it wasn’t obvious for the time) Bandai instead thought of using this medium to mainly produce “guided interaction” titles, so to speak, a bit along the lines of Dragon’s Lair.
His games were not actually 100% interactive video games, but real guided stories where, every now and then, the user could make choices that made slight changes to the narrative. The vast majority of titles in the catalog were developed by Bandai itself, the only third-party title was Ie Naki Ko – Suzu no Sentaku by VAP (subsidiary of Nippon Television) which, also in this case, produced an interactive full motion video based on the Japanese TV series of the same name.
Strength points
Did Playdia even have some strengths? In the mix of slightly bizarre and slightly wrong ideas, Bandai actually did something good. For example the integrated wireless controller. Going from memory (because the web doesn’t help us in this case) it represented one of the first cases of wireless joypad integrated by default into the hardware (and not an accessory to be purchased separately, as in the case of the Sega Saturn or the very first infrared controller from Atari).
The fact of inserting it directly into the Playdia chassis represented both a convenience and a strong limitation: there was no two-player mode in any title. Bandai was aware that it had designed a console “for children”, with all the limitations involved. The mistake he certainly didn’t make was that of the price, positioned at 24,800 yen against 44,800 for the SEGA Saturn and 39,800 for the Sony Playstation.
The memory he left us
The wrong target, the low power, the extremely limited playground and the lack of third-party support then decreed the premature end of the colorful Bandai Playdiaa console that did not go beyond the borders of the Japanese market, but rightfully entered the hearts of all video game enthusiasts who look partly with affection, partly with the desire to own mythological and difficult to find consoles, an extremely disadvantaged and unfortunate of the time.
There are no official data on its diffusion, but it is estimated that around 120 thousand pieces were sold and distributed during 1994. The console in fact lasted less than a year, on a commercial level, and was finally discontinued in 1996, leaving its legacy to the collaboration between Bandai and Apple for their “Pippin” console, yet another case of sensational failure… and a mythological console destined today for the most extreme collecting.
